Reincarnation has a good deal of hard evidence to support it, and that this evidence is frequently more impressive than many people are aware.

Dr. Ian Stevenson (1918-2007), a Virginia psychiatrist of impeccable credentials, who began studying cases of conscious past life memories in children in the late fifties.

Studying almost 3,000 cases of children—most of them between four and ten years of age—who were able to recall having lived past lives, he was impressed with their ability to remember not only their previous life names, but even the date they died and details about the villages in which they previously lived. Many were even able to accurately identify members of their “former” family and were often able to recount “pet names” and intricate details of their previous lives with uncanny accuracy.

Additionally, many of the children Stevenson studied could remember how they had died in their previous life, providing details of their demise with a degree of certainty and knowledge inexplicable for a child.

During the course of his travels he noticed that occasionally some of the children he studied revealed marks on their bodies that precisely corresponded with the fatal wounds they claim their previous personality had suffered at the time of their death. For instance, one of Dr. Stevenson’s subjects, an eleven year old Turkish boy, recounted having been accidentally shot in the head with a shotgun by a neighbor in a previous incarnation.

Probably the best known type of evidence for reincarnation and the type most people think of when considering the subject is that which comes from hypnotic regression. In this controversial technique, subjects are hypnotized and led back through their present life to childhood before being asked to go to a “time before” their present life and describe what they see and experience. Often, subjects are able to recall extremely specific and precise personal details of their past lives such as full names, place of residence, occupations, names of spouses and family members, and other pertinent details of an alleged past life (sometimes even to the precise street address at which they previously resided) many of which frequently prove to be historically, culturally or geographically accurate.A prodigy is a child who possesses a special gift or talent—usually for science or the arts—they not only seem to excel at but become remarkably proficient at years ahead of their contemporaries. Good examples of prodigies include the German composer Amadeus Mozart, who was able to compose simple arrangements of music at the age of four and compose entire symphonies by adolescence, and the 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, who managed to outline a new geometric system by the age of 11. While modern science attributes these rare gifts to simple brain chemistry, it fails to ask the question of why their brains are wired differently than other people or, precisely, in which way they are differently wired.Déjà vu is the strange sense that one is repeating an experience they’re certain they’ve never had before, or possessing an inexplicable knowledge of the layout of a building or city that one has never visited before. To some people, such experiences are considered evidence of a past life—an echo or ill-defined memory that has somehow survived the rebirthing process to be inadvertently triggered by some event in the present.Phobias—those unusual and often overwhelming feelings of fear we sometimes have regarding things that usually do not constitute a genuine danger to us—is a common phenomenon almost everyone has experienced at one time or another. How one acquires a phobia is a well understood process; they are the result of some trauma or event from one’s past—usually in childhood—that manifests itself in later life as an often irrational fear.